Luke Combs’s Growing Pains

“When It Rains It Pours,” one of Luke Combs’s first hits, portrays the opposite of a family man. The country star watches as his “bitchin’ and moanin’” girlfriend walks out, later pockets a waitress’s number at Hooters, and celebrates never having to see his “ex-future mother-in-law” again. On that single and the rest of his debut album, 2017’s This One’s for You, Combs quickly developed a reputation for loud, spirited songs about drowning your troubles in a cold beer and having a good time. But a few years later, he was shunning that image for a more grown-up Combs: a wiser, calmer man who knows when he’s had one too many.

That fit with the changes happening in his personal life. Outside of becoming one of country music’s biggest stars, Combs got engaged to his longtime girlfriend (who played the Hooters waitress in the “When It Rains” video) in 2018, married her in 2020, and then had two sons 14 months apart. For his third album, 2022’s Growin’ Up, Combs now found himself caught between the hard partying of his 20s (“Any Given Friday Night”) and the heavier responsibilities of his 30s (“Tomorrow Me”). He was a dedicated lover on “The Kind of Love We Make” and gave advice about lost love on “Going, Going, Gone.” By the album’s 2023 counterpart, Gettin’ Old, Combs was replacing the expected drinking songs with ones like “Joe,” a rare ballad about sobriety in contemporary country music, and opener “Growin’ Up and Gettin’ Old” sounded like a new mission statement: “These days I hang my hat on what I won’t do / And I’ve been findin’ peace of mind slowin’ my roll.” Even his rambunctious story of young love on “Hannah Ford Road” was told in past tense.

By pursuing this path, Combs has avoided the embarrassing fate of country artists like Tyler Hubbard, who struggle to keep making a style of party music they’ve long outgrown. But on his latest album, Fathers & Sons, Combs swings so far into maturity and fatherhood that he forgets what made his music fun in the first place. Motifs about superheroes and sports quickly get worn out. “In Case I Ain’t Around” is one of many songs that falls into cliché, with Combs offering his children advice like “Make sure y’all all still eat together / At your mama’s after church on Sunday.” One of the album’s most compelling moments, on “Front Door Famous,” comes as Combs shifts his perspective from son to father mid-song, but when he deploys that trick again on “All I Ever Do Is Leave” and “My Old Man Was Right,” it feels predictable and unmoving. He even tries cutting songs by other famous Nashville dads, like Luke Bryan and Rhett Akins, but their contributions sound hackneyed, full of the usual tropes about a good country life.

Where are the full-throttle thrills Combs used to deliver? They still came through in flashes on Growin’ Up and Gettin’ Old, like in the hair-raising bridge of “Where the Wild Things Are” or the rousing passion of “Doin’ This.” Those personal stories are still far from party songs — but who’s to say the grown-up Combs can’t keep making a few of those either? Even George Strait, one of the genre’s all-time great storytellers, could cut loose as he was nearing 60 on his winking, self-aware hit “Here for a Good Time.”

But Combs’s pivot hasn’t hurt him on the charts. Shortly before Growin’ Up, he had one of the biggest hits of his career in “Forever After All,” a tender love song that broke country streaming records and debuted at No. 2 on the all-genre Hot 100. So he built on that achievement by only releasing ballads as singles from Growin’ Up. All three continued his success on country radio and in the top 40; “The Kind of Love We Make” even peaked at No. 8 on the Hot 100.

Incidentally, the approach also helped Combs differentiate himself from the genre’s only bigger crossover star, Morgan Wallen. A few years ago, both were known for their youthful bar songs. But by last summer, they had competing visions of country music jostling on the charts: Wallen’s “Last Night” was a snap-track apology for the previous night’s drunken mistakes, and Combs’s cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” was a reverent take on his first favorite song — a story of a struggling couple searching for an escape. While Wallen has continued keeping bro country alive this decade, leading a movement of artists like Hardy, Ernest, and now even Post Malone, critics derided his style, and his party-boy image is becoming a liability. Intentionally or not, Combs can now dodge those associations by fashioning himself into the figurehead “country gentleman” — artists taking after the sentimentalists of the ’80s and ’90s in making songs more fit for weddings and funerals than nights out. It’s an easy role for someone used to playing the everyman, and a viable one too, with singers like Cody Johnson and Jordan Davis rising behind Combs.

With that chart success and distinction from Wallen, Combs has little incentive to change — but that doesn’t mean he needs to restrict himself artistically like he does on Fathers & Sons. Now that he’s shown he’s grown up, his next challenge is bridging the wiser, more mature Combs with the vibrant performer his fans still love. He did it before on his 2019 album What You See Is What You Get, which featured some of his liveliest anthems alongside a few more thoughtful moments. One of those was “Even Though I’m Leaving,” a song about fatherhood that Combs wrote years before he even had his first son. If he could make that song then, surely he can still have a bit of fun now.